Double whammy: posting a few days late (though I DID finish the book within the week) AND I cheated on this one.
I started reading Freakonomics a few months back and then got too busy with application reading and schoolwork to finish it, so I picked it up this past week about 20% of the way through (according to Kindle). I also committed a cardinal sin and saw the movie before reading the book, though this isn’t the kind of book for which that matters, so I feel pretty okay about it.
I’m not really sure where to start with this book. It took me close to 10 years to read it from the time it was released but I am so glad I finally did. I watched part of the documentary in my first class of my graduate program a couple of years ago and I was amazed at how easily the authors explained incentives. Could I really like data after all?
I did take a bunch of data classes in undergrad as part of my major, but nothing this easily understood. One of the classes was Research Methods, in which my professor promised she would make our understanding of the world crumble around us and then help us build it back up. She was pretty spot on in that description- I reference at least one thing I learned in that class or project I did every few weeks, even five years later. That said, it didn’t mean I believed I liked data- I just liked the professor. When I read the book, it struck me that these authors- Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner- offered a very similar delivery as my Research Methods professor. Her philosophy was to make it relatable, so we studied things such as the flu vaccine and lying, which helped us to understand larger concepts without weighing it down. Levitt and Dubner tackle big things in the same way.
Overall, it’s a ridiculously interesting read. There’s not a whole lot to say that I could distill into a few sentences, so this is really the kind of book that is best simply read and understood. My favorite chapter of the book was about names and determining whether or not an individual’s name plays into his or her level of success or failure in life. I am personally compelled by this notion and find myself particularly interested in the impact of alphabetical order, especially given that my last name is towards the end of the alphabet AND through some of my own statistical observations while reading applications. Though this was not addressed within the book, Stephen Dubner did cover it in a blog post in 2011- worth a read if you’d like to get a taste of what the book is like without committing yourself to all of it. (Or part of it and the rest later.) I covered the NYPD crime case study in another graduate school course so I was pretty compelled by that one too, but possibly just because I knew how it ended. (Spoiler: it ended relatively well for New York and not as well for criminals.)
I’m definitely intrigued by both their model and their delivery- I love how relatable data can be. I’m excited to read more blog posts by Levitt and Dubner to get some quick bites of data- a good happy medium if you’re interested in the information but don’t want to commit to the entire book at once.
You’ll like this if: you’ve always been compelled by data but not for its dryness and enjoy connections between seemingly unrelated things. Not the right book if you’re looking for a light read but not hard to put down and pick back up (from experience).
Happy reading!
carlyreads 